EP 169: Demystifying the Future of Banking, AI & Customer-Centric Innovation with Joe Wilson

Speaker A: Welcome to Dave and Dom Demystify, a fintech futures podcast helping make sense of the world of fintech and digital finance. Please sit back and listen as the two Ds take a subject and discuss it to make it clearer and easier to understand.

Speaker B: Demystify.

Speaker C: Welcome, everybody, to the Dave and Dahm Demystify Show. And this week, it's a very special week for two reasons. First and foremost, it's Dave's birthday. Happy birthday, Dave. Happy birthday, Dave.

Speaker D: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Speaker C: Exactly. And the other reason is we have a very special guest from Funk, Joe Wilson. Welcome, Joe. Hey, thanks for having me, guys. It's nice to be here and to kind of like, dig into the industry a little bit with you. Excellent, excellent. Look, not many people in Europe are not going to know who BUNK is, but for those people that, uh, don't know Bunk, can you give us a quick intro, firstly to yourself and then to Bunk? Yeah, I think I'll keep mine rather short. I mean, what I do for BUNK is I'm the chief evangelist, which means I get to move information from the outside world, inside the company, and from inside the company and outside, make sure the users are always the priority for everyone, and fundamentally make sure that

Speaker E: the people in the outside world and the inside of the company both understand what's happening both ways. So that's

Speaker C: sort

Speaker E: of the way

Speaker C: to think

Speaker E: of my job, my background everybody

Speaker C: can

Speaker E: sort

Speaker C: of find on LinkedIn

Speaker E: and

Speaker C: stuff like that. I've been around Bunk for a little while.

Speaker E: I've

Speaker C: played three different

Speaker E: roles.

Speaker C: I

Speaker E: started actually on the board of the

Speaker C: company.

Speaker E: I spent some years on the board.

Speaker C: I went

Speaker E: into

Speaker C: the

Speaker E: company as

Speaker C: the

Speaker E: COO

Speaker C: for a

Speaker E: couple

Speaker C: of years and

Speaker E: did much of the international expansion you see today, and then left again and then came back one more time to do this role. I'm, um, good friends with Ali, who's the CEO, and I play this unique role across Bunk where I can do things like this and also affect the direction of the company if it needs to be. So I get that wonderful balance, uh, and things. So I think the way to think about Bum for everybody is that we didn't fix a bank, right? We built one from scratch. This was the first Greenfield European banking license in 35 years. And it was made in a way that everything could start fresh. The platform, the technology, everything. I mean, earliest all AI. And we'll talk about AI, I'm sure, and I'll show you how early we are into this. But everything became fresh and clean and new so that we could Build it the way that it was supposed to be built after all these hundreds of years of changes, which means we brought it back to the user. That was bunk. Now, statistically speaking, Bunk is Europe's second largest neobank, has 22 million customers across seven different countries. It's rapidly expanding into new places and it's been profitable for more than three years, which seems to be something that eludes a lot of neobanks, except for us.

Speaker C: I mean, that's pretty amazing. But I mean, I guess, you know, you said it starts with the consumer. What's different about Bunk? If I, as a consumer, you know, shortly. An account is an account is an account, right?

Speaker E: Yeah, you'd think so. But first and foremost, we would never call our users an account and we would never call them a consumer. Those are just words we would never use. These are users we operate through a mobile banking app and everybody who is engaged with us is engaged in that app. And you have to understand that relationship. First and foremost, money is an intimate relationship between people and a bank. It's fundamentally based on trust and you have to design around what people need. So if I were to take you to our company, you would see this unbelievable obsession with the user. Who are they, where are they, what do they do, what do they need? And we only make decisions based on that. So that's what I mean when I say it that way, that this is a fundamental central tenet of the company, that everything that gets done is done for the user. If you wanted to move around the uh, chairs in the cafeteria, you'd have to do a proposal. You'd have to prove to everyone why it was better for the user, otherwise we wouldn't move them a single inch.

Speaker D: In terms of history, how long's Bunk been going? Because I'm really interested in that whole kind of sort of obsession with the user.

Speaker E: So we celebrate our 10 year anniversary, but it's really probably about 12 when you think of the original start date up until the license, but 10 years operating as a licensed bank. So that's the way to answer your question directly. That's the year.

Speaker D: And in terms of the sort of founders of the business, have they come out of the banking industry themselves?

Speaker E: No, not at all. The founder of this is Ali Nignum. So Ali is the CEO and uh, this is his third company that he's built. And in each case Ali is a, an engineer who identifies problems and he wants to fix a problem through technology. In a lot of ways we get referred to as a tech company with a Banking license, because we're very much tech first. For all the problems that are out there, and we will look at it through this lens, there was a problem. There are people who live internationally, there are fundamentally underserved by the banking industry. People think of it as a niche, and yet an incumbent just uses the word niche when it's something that they didn't plan for, they didn't know how to serve. So that's how it came to be. He represented that, people he knew represented that. And there was a technology could absorb the complexity. And of course, post 2008, the world needed a new way to think about banking and trust. And he saw a way.

Speaker D: I mean, it is really interesting because I guess my background is user experience. So Dharmesh, and we talked about this on the podcast before we were there at the birth of the Internet banking revolution in the uk, Dharmesh was technology and I was user experience. I think it's kind of fair to say that. I mean, my experience for the subsequent sort of 20 years in the industry was one of massive frustration, where you talk to people about being customer centric. But the reality is what we were doing is, I like to say, is we were fluffing existing processes, so we were taking the existing industry and just making it more usable. And actually what I discovered is we were part of a kind of cost reduction process, so pushing the consumer to kind of take on a lot of the work. And I use the word consumer there because I would often feel like that, despite the fact that my clients would say we obsess about the customer, they couldn't give two figures about their customer, um, because customers, they would do weird things. So it's really interesting to kind of hear that was the sort of foundation

Speaker E: just to catch on something you said. I think that if you go back to history in banking, we could all track it all the way back to the very beginning. But ultimately it became sort of about making money from money as opposed to serving a user. And I think we just wanted to flip that on its head. And we have a subscription model. I think you guys know that's a primary way that we engage. There's other ways you can make money as a bank, but we always wanted to build something that someone felt it was, was worth paying for. And so we keep the subscription because it's the measuring stick of value. If someone is not willing to buy a subscription for what we're doing, then we're not doing our job. So we have this view. I understand what you said. If you take History. And you look at sort of the main structures of a bank and the way that it made money, you couldn't do it. You just couldn't. But we didn't start there. Right. We started with. There's this crazy industry. It's numerical, it has structure to it. Technology can solve a lot of the problems. Let's take a new approach. So that's. We just started fresh,

Speaker D: I guess, circle around a few things. But I guess that puts you in a very strong position for the flexibility needed for the future, doesn't it, in terms of what's coming down the line from an AI point of view? So I'm kind of interested to just sort of jump straight into that side of things, if we can.

Speaker E: Happy to. Is there a particular question you want me to address? You want me to start talking about AI?

Speaker D: So you've kind of got some great foundations in place, and I'm wondering how much flexibility was part of that story in terms of being consumer focused. Because, frankly, if you look at the industry now, like the legacy banks, they have a long way to go, I think, in terms of being able to kind of really adopt AI in a sort of really proactive, efficient way for their customers, not even a valid way for their customers. Whereas I think if you've got kind of flexibility built into your proposition, that's a great foundation, isn't it?

Speaker E: Yeah. Let me say it this way. Like, for us, AI isn't a, uh, feature or a thing that we had to adopt. It's our operational DNA. And we started it years before it ever became an industry convention. I mean, all the way back to 2016, we've been a generative AI company. Like, we began again, tech company with banking license. Use the technology to solve the problem. Okay, you need to scale, you need to serve a user better, you need to understand them better, all those things. AI is an operating system that runs in everything we do. So support, marketing, coding, finance, all the elements of the company. We have AI running through the middle. Someone asked me at, uh, a. I think at an event, what is AI Debunk? And I was like, well, what's the water in the swimming pool? It's not really a swimming pool without the water. And yet it makes it a lot more fun. And I think to put some numbers to that, like our Fin, which is our AI system, handles 97% of all of our supports. It solves most issues within 47 seconds. We get a 90% customer satisfaction rate on those tickets it handles in AML. It's in compliance. It's in KYC. It's also in warding off the dark forces. Everyone thinks that AI on the front end, but there's a whole war in the back end that we're all fighting day in, day out. Right. And I personally want the most technologically savvy companies in the world protecting my money. So I like that idea. So when you think about bunk and you think of AI, this is a synonymous symbiotic relationship. It's not a we didn't start like an innovation team to do a project like this runs through everything we do.

Speaker C: What about, I guess it's almost now, the near future with the way that people talk about it with agents. And it's becoming clearer and clearer now to people. It wasn't as little as six months ago that, uh, potentially the interface for all banks is going to be an agent and not their own user interface or the bank's own agent. How do you see that playing out? I mean, do you think that customers will find their own agents that essentially will open accounts, manage their money for themselves independent of the bank, or do you think they'll defer to actually using the agent that the bank provides? Where do you see that going?

Speaker E: I think you're projecting a, uh, future version. How far that is in the future, I don't know. But let's separate for the sake of conversation. Anybody listening? Like in today's version, we need to separate generative and agentic just for the moment. Right. So we need to make sure people understand generative and agentic. Agentic is when you give it a set of instructions and it's become, I wouldn't say autonomous, but semi autonomous. Let's hope there's a human in the loop, that type of component. Right. So you're discussing the second one. I'd also say, keep in mind there are, I like to think of AI in two categories, which I call the laboratory and the manufacturing floor. Right. So there's a laboratory and then there's the actual where you ship. So in the lab we're on frontier models and we're token matching and doing those types of things. But in the factory we're literally on running and building a business every day through these tools. So those two things kind of all parallel to then get to your question. I think we're a good space. There's a trust layer. There's a problem here on the trust layer. Uh, problem, opportunity, whatever you want to look at. So we're not yet in a world where humans, ah, are ready to turn everything over. We're also not in a world yet where enough humans really understand what it means to turn everything over. There's a lot of gaps in there. But in the future, at some point, I think that we will see agentic commerce, which will be agent to agent. And I think also you will see consumers who become very AI savvy, maybe this will be generational, I don't know. And they will probably, I would think, want to have their own. Like you're having your teammate with your rules, interacting with others on the other side. That's what I expect. But again, this is all just complete dreaming forward to be for now.

Speaker D: In terms of that, how does a brand like Bunk, um, play though? Because theoretically, in that world, your customer becomes the agent itself rather than the consumer. I mean, there's a sort of multitude of things that you've got to kind of think about, isn't there,

Speaker E: at that point? I think so. Today this isn't the reality. So we are today. When that becomes a reality, we will be right at the forefront of it. But today it's fundamentally about the human and the user and their needs and what they ask for and what they want. And we will stay focused on that. I'm not really here to predict too much, but I can help you see the lens of today's reality, what people need in that audience that we serve.

Speaker D: And again, this is a sort of more detailed question around the use of AI in terms of the way you're kind of developing the product and the proposition, when I was doing that work, it's a very manual process. Like we would go and we would test with consumers. You make changes to your ideas based on that has that whole process sort of sped up. So are you able to kind of go through iteration cycles a lot faster? Or is user sort of testing still a vital part of that? Or is it something that you're sort of able to kind of use AI to, I guess, model out,

Speaker E: I'd say. I mentioned Fin before, which is our AI system. Fin has a remarkable number of signals that it can consume, right? So we get customer support signals all day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 38 different languages. That's a set of signals that are coming in. We have an outbound process to speak directly to 2,500 users in the course of every month or every quarter. So that's another. So you can then triangulate that around and then so you have this massive ability, because one is the AI system allows you to manage so much more data than you might have had to do before so that you have, um, so much more signal. You can really get rid of the noise and look at the signal ratios and be able to get to the truth of things. And ultimately, I think the benefit of what I believe agentic, uh, will be in near term will be the ability to sort of head off problems before they happen. I always tell people, look, if I'm at Amazon and I've gone back and checked into the app, the package three or four times, you probably know already, based on what I've tapped, that I'm trying to figure out where my delivery is. But you haven't done anything about it. I still have to ask, but all the data is right there in front of us. And I think the same thing happens within systems like ours. We'll be able to head off things agentically and we'll also be using agents in the dark side where we will be attacking and defending Ferrars. Uh, so. So I think, to answer your question more directly, because we're a fresh system, by the way, we don't have all the issues that the older banks have. We have massive amounts of data that is very clean and easy to use and that we can work on. That then gives us more signal that then allows us to predict and do what the user needs faster. And in the course of design, it works within that type of system.

Speaker C: I have to say that's, uh, one of the most underestimated things about a new bank is that it's not just about the technology shifting from monolith to microservices, but, uh, the ability for the data to be not structured into the silos and be much more freely available throughout the organization.

Speaker E: You valued it in the origination, right? You value the origination of the company and its purpose. So now it's a tenant, it's a central ability of the company.

Speaker D: I was just going to add that, I mean, this was one of, again, a massive bugbear of mine is I would go into these big banks and, um, when we talked about designing for the future, I'd say, well, what your customer services people, what are the complaints from customers? What are customers worrying about? And because it was very siloed, you could never kind of connect into the real kind of guts of that information. So the fact that's built into the system, as Dharmasha says, it's, that's something that people forget. When you kind of build these new platforms, you've got the ability to be able to do that. And I can really see in terms of what you're saying that AI can get rid of the noise so you can really focus on the signals. So you know what the most important things to be doing are, uh, in terms of sort of future releases

Speaker E: as UX guys, I mean we also know where they're tapping, why they're tapping, what's going on, what the outcome is, what's the context that goes around that. And when we look at like I was speaking at a conference on support. I'm not a support expert but I was asked to speak and I. We had this sort of divide in our thesis. Their thesis was like the metrics of support. My thesis is what is the user trying to actually do? Like did they get the outcome a payment didn't go through, did that get fixed as opposed to how long was the hold time? And I think this is what you talk about when you get into UX and everything else is can you actually focus on what the user's goal was and understand that contextually and use that as a measurement of success rather than whatever your traditional industry metrics are.

Speaker C: Do you as a company measure your sales on product sales?

Speaker E: Product sales. We measure ourselves on growth, measure ourselves on user happiness. You know, user satisfaction. I uh, don't. Satisfaction wouldn't be the word we'd use. Satisfaction is not really a strong enough term really for us. And we measure ourselves on. Yeah, growth is the other way. I would just say like that's product sales. I don't. We don't. The term product isn't something that we really use.

Speaker C: Well, well that, that is 100% correct answer. But uh. Because if you ask any other bank of course going to say of course we have to sell. And this is where I struggle with banks that really don't understand what being a customer platform actually is versus being what they hate to be called is a dumb pipe. But fact of matter is that if you measure yourself on product sales you are a pipe. Sorry, but that's just the way the world is. But yeah, I mean I love that part of it. So in terms of like your growth etc. You're not in the UK though

Speaker E: on our way at some point I would say

Speaker C: yeah, can you accelerate that please?

Speaker E: I was the right. I think these are always regulator conversations. Not a, not a Joe question,

Speaker C: I get it. But I mean I guess as a kind of like based out the UK and um, mainly we kind of focus on Europe. Right. We see that some of the our banks and I know bank as well is looking at the U.S. what do you think Is the main challenge in the US for especially like European companies like a Revolut, et cetera, Monzo, uh, who tried, I think. I don't know if they're still trying. But what is the challenges with the US and how do you think you'll overcome the challenges?

Speaker E: We're in active discussions, the regulators right now, so I won't go too much into this because it's really a matter for that conversation. But to broaden your question and keep it a bit more generic, if that's okay, what do I think the challenge is? I think, look, prior to being involved with Bunk, I told you, I've started out on the board, I'm an entrepreneur. I've started and run five of my own companies. I've had two exits, we've had three that didn't make it so much. And I even worked for Microsoft for more than a decade on, um, multibillion dollar divisions. So I have a lot of insight into running companies in the US And I think when you come from Europe and you go over there, I think one, you don't understand how large it really is, and two, you don't understand how noisy it really is. And noise is expensive. So I think most companies have to be prepared to cut through the noise. Which means either you're extraordinarily focused, like Bonk, who has this really specific audience that we focus on. People that are borderless, they're living internationally, they have an international mindset, they want to, their life is between more than one country, or you're just going to try and buy as much as you can. We don't believe that buying growth in like this large gross way is the right way to do it. We think you have to have a high value solution for a specific audience. And fundamentally that would be a strategy we would use to enter any market.

Speaker D: I mean, I guess picking up on that in terms of your very specific audience, which I think again is interesting, I worked on a proposition for many years which was trying to attract that same audience.

Speaker E: Oh, what's the definition of the same audience then?

Speaker D: It was the internationalistas, we called them. So it was people who were, uh, borderless

Speaker C: digital nomads.

Speaker D: Yeah,

Speaker E: well, there's a few variations. Right. So I think you hear things like digital nomad, you hear expat. Digital expat was a friendly term that came up for a while. There are people who think of like the international elite, which is like rich people flying around on jets in any country they want to go to. For us, these are people who have a real reason to deal with more than one country. Right. So maybe you're a European who's on an expat assignment in the U.S. maybe, uh, like me, I'm an American who is speaking to you from Amsterdam. But I've lived in, in three different continents, in seven different countries and moved four children all over the world. So it's these types of situations. Maybe you're an entrepreneur in Germany who has a small rental business in Spain. Whatever the case may be, there's more than one country in your life. So that's the audience that we think of when. So if that's the one you're thinking of, then we're on the same page.

Speaker D: Yeah, no, it's definitely that. But I was really interested in the whole subscription perspective, like getting people to pay for the service. Because I guess you could argue that one of the biggest problems that we created in the UK was free banking. So actually not paying for something means that, ah, by definition you might not be a customer. So I was just wondering, like in terms of that group of people who I can imagine they may be the people who are more prepared to pay for kind of, I don't know, the Lloyds, whatever account where they get travel insurance and access to lounges and things like that, was that sort of part of the, you know, by getting people to pay for this, you then are, I guess, really thinking about them as your customer.

Speaker E: I mean, free accounts still exist. Even we have a free version if somebody really wants it. I think there's so much more benefit in the subscriptions. But the point is that, let me explain it this way. Most banks make money when something goes wrong for you, right? So like there's an overdraft or you need something, or as there's a lot, you tend to make money on the problems. And we've always felt that's just the upside down way of looking at a service relationship. Fundamentally, uh, there should be things that are just included if I'm going to bank some of the costs of money should somehow be able to be absorbed in all of this. Especially if we're using technology to solve these problems so we have options for having zero effects. We can open up 25 IBANs with a single account. So you can manage multiple accounts, multiple businesses, you can organize your money so simply. So I think to your question, are those people more prone to pay for a subscription? I don't know. I think for the audience that we serve, we have technical solutions to problems that are specific to them and thereby the value is Very clear. And thus you say, oh, I'd rather play this flat fee subscription and get all this load of things than I would to go and pick it out one by one every single time I do anything. And I think that's more the thesis, sort of the customer centric philosophy that we would have.

Speaker D: And was that sort of subscription model something that was there from M day one?

Speaker E: Always. Yeah.

Speaker D: Okay. Yeah.

Speaker E: It was decided to say I would rather bring a lot of value into one thing for a small cost than I would to try. And it just, I mean it's like simplicity, right. It's like again, UX people, we like designs, we like elegance. Right. So this is what we would consider elegance.

Speaker C: It's interesting. I had a conversation with a tier one bank that Dave knows very well. It's a global bank. And when I had a dev center in Bangalore, we opened an account because I needed to pay people in. In India.

Speaker E: Danesh. I used to live in Bangalore.

Speaker C: Oh, okay.

Speaker E: Right off MG Road in usor. So I was there. Oh

Speaker C: yeah, yeah. So we had an office not far off MG Roads. Yeah. But you know, it's funny because we paid the bank £17amonth, um, just for the privilege to do an international transfer at a rate that was crap. And then also it would typically take two, three days anyway and if a payment didn't get there, then it would take another week or so at least to trace the payment. And at that time I moved to transferwise and it was just amazing for me that I, A, I wasn't paying a fee, but B, I could just watch my money traveling and then instantaneously get some response back versus the experience I had before. But the strange part for me was I never thought about that, uh, £17 as a subscription. I just thought that this was a rip off thing and actually it was. Right.

Speaker E: Look, be clear. There is no actual free bank account.

Speaker C: Correct? Correct.

Speaker E: Because there's always like minimum balances or activities or transactions. And also of course the float is what you're discussing. Like

Speaker C: yes,

Speaker E: plenty of money to be made off the float.

Speaker C: What I like about this conversation is that what transpires is that a subscription, like what you're providing is much more honest banking. It's not the fees that are hidden buried in the problems.

Speaker E: No, no.

Speaker C: It's a value added service and you're up front with a whole load of features that you're getting.

Speaker E: This is a cost checkbox 100. Yeah, I would tell you I have a brokerage account in the US because I'm from The US and I had to wire some money to Europe and my brokerage account did not know. I was comparing the currency exchange rate between the US dollar and I was like, why is there like a, a nickel difference in the, you know. And they looked and we had to dig it through it. The brokerage house didn't know that they use a third party transfer system. We then took another nickel. So there's. They didn't even know. And so talk about hidden. It was even hidden from the people providing the service. And in our case it's transparency is you can't have this trusted relationship unless you're transparent. The moment you start hiding things or sneaking around the corner or putting somewhere late, you just break that. And if there's anything that's most important in the next generation of banking, it's going to be trust technology.

Speaker D: I 100% agree. I mean I think we're already at a point where most people are a bit confused as to who they bank with anyway because like we all have multiple different banks for different things now. And yeah, I think you're absolutely right. As the future becomes a bit more generative or agentic, then potentially becomes even more confusing. So I think trust becomes the most important thing that a bank can do. And I think part of that trust is being open and honest. And I think, you know, again I go back to if the foundations of the business were in order to kind of make the best sort of experience that we can. We're going to ask people to pay for that. I think that's a fantastic thing to do.

Speaker C: Can I ask also just a slightly different topic? Um, one is, which is really about tokenization. There's a lot of talk about it. A lot of it came up maybe towards the end of last year, but it's been the hot topic of this year. Apart from agents. When it comes to tech and stuff. What are you doing in the space of kind of tokenization or how do you think about it

Speaker E: organization? We're not really doing too much in this space. I mean our users are not asking for this. This is not something. Now they did ask for crypto. They wanted to have crypto and their bank in the same app which we made available. We even opened up a bunk as a service for other companies that wanted to do something like that because it could extend our ability to serve the same user. But things like tokenization is just not something that's right there in their everyday life right now. When it becomes a demand, we will fully engage it. But until that point we need to focus on the things they need today.

Speaker C: No, yeah, I kind of get that. And I also believe that uh, the end customer should never have to worry about tokenization. I guess what I'm interested in is do you see in a similar way to AI, an efficiency play on using the new Rails because they're faster, cheaper, less complex to kind of manage, potentially me doing a uh, point of point transfer to banks anywhere in the world rather than having to go through those old Rails which you know, had layers and layers of middlemen that all took their pennies worth.

Speaker E: Yeah, I don't think I'm an expert enough in that space to answer your question. I think we look deeply into things like stablecoins because that's a pretty interesting space and so much transactions are happening and of course made that available to users. But in terms of whether like what you're really talking about is the jumping over to the digital asset Rails rather than using the traditional Rails, there's an awful lot of regulatory stuff that you didn't mention in there. There's often a lot of lines drawn, licenses to keep those two things apart. And we're operating in one side of this today primarily which then we have to respect that and work with the regulators to make sure that of course all of our users are heavily protected and it's all legal and above ground. So the thing that you ask is a great question, but there's some walls in the way there that you didn't bring up.

Speaker C: No, I agree and I think especially from the regulator's perspective when I spoke to like players like the FCA and even Europe now Europe leads I think actually in crypto regulation, essentially tokenization regulation. Right. And so with the delay in the Clarity act in the US then I think actually Europe leads the way and we have regs already now for stablecoin issuers and also for tokenization. So I think it's an area that some banks are uh, looking at in isolation and some banks are starting to see the overlap with tokenization as in

Speaker E: the only banks that I know that are looking deeply as you're mentioning are probably ones that are also like the JP Morgans of the world who are also trying to. There's also an entire investment arm to all of this and they're probably the first ones that have even touched Quantum in any way to consider what it could be doing because there's no true commercial user focused consumer facing bank that is any meaningful use of Quantum. So these tokenization service that earlier in the stack, when that time comes And I think a lot of them are. They're also running into the regulatory problems between these two things. But I do think there's a, uh, future of moving money. I mean, look, we can move money instantly. We should stop pretending that we can. There's just a lot of people making money off of. What did we talk about a little while ago? The float. So I think there's a, there's an old and new battle that we know. Old school, new school battle that will continue here for a little while.

Speaker C: The other thing that's true is that you don't face the same problems as some of the incumbent banks because on a modern platform you don't have a batch window and you're doing things in real time.

Speaker E: We don't even have as 400 machines anywhere in the basement either, so. No, exactly. We don't have a lot of these things that slow everybody down. And of course across Europe there's a pretty modern transfer system which is pretty instant if you want to be. When you move beyond that, you get into other things, I think. So it's really the world connectivity and Rails that have become interesting to your question.

Speaker D: The other thing which I'm, um, fascinated by is sort of the, your international expansion. And we live in this kind of crazy world where business and um, technology is going international, but you got kind of nationalism kind of driving people more locally. But I think if you kind of play the story out like the world is, things are becoming more international so we all watch the same TV around the world, we buy the same crypto. Um, is that kind of international mindset for your customers? Are you adopting that for yourselves as well? I mean, from day one where you like, okay, we have to be an international business.

Speaker E: Yeah, I think we would say something kind of a shtick or kitschy like born in Amsterdam, raised on the world, that type of thing. I mean fundamentally we were never designed to be a single country company. We always believed there'd be a multi international. Uh, this is just the way you have to begin with that idea. Like you never settle for a single country situation. So we always knew that it was an international company. It's just a matter of how you go step by step in order to get to the different countries. So yes, we believe that inherently, but again, same reason, because the people that we serve, the users that we focus on, they are international people and we have to be where they are as fast as we possibly can.

Speaker D: It's very interesting because I guess that is one of like, again, if you look at legacy Banks, the way they're organized, like if they're an international bank, they'll have separate entities all around the world. I mean in terms of how you're organized, do you have country specific teams or are you sort of looking at the world just purely at customer level?

Speaker E: So there are regulatory requirements. When we talk about being international, this is not a technology problem, this is a regulatory challenge. Right. So it's not that we can't technically manage or move or handle or deal with users or money from any country almost. It is a regulatory requirement. Licensing fees, taxes, money laundering, kyc, all those things. So there are countries where you're required to have people working and have even a physical office space and wherever that's required. Of course we'll always do that. We would prefer to not even if we don't have to, because that's just. I don't want to spend euro that would go to that. It's another euro I could spend on users. So we'll always think of it that way. But I think yes and no maybe is the way to answer your question.

Speaker D: Totally. I mean, I think there's a good response. It's sort of in your heart. You see yourself as a one team internationally rather than, um. I guess many banks will sort of have local teams who are very. They're looking downwards, not upwards.

Speaker E: To date, every single entity that might exist throughout, uh, what we're doing in all the seven countries in Europe are all tied to the Dutch banking license. It's a single operational system that is all running now as you go continental, you know, different licenses are required and different entities. We will still maintain the connectivity, but I just think we consider ourselves, uh, we're an international organization who, I mean in our company. Just to give you a sense of this, I was invited to talk at a DEI meeting here in Amsterdam. And I went in and I said, I don't know why I'm invited. They said, well it's your statistics. I mean inside our company there are 54 nationalities. Just today we have 54 different nationalities today working at our company we have 40%, 42% female. These aren't challenges that we have because we just don't recruit like other people. Other people have this whole like resume thing. We don't even look at CVs. It's all about your skills and your capabilities and what you're able to do and what you can show you can do. And it's not about your CV and your age and your specific banking experience and stuff like that. So these are Things. And the reason I mentioned is when you say are we international at heart? I think there's no better indication that we are international at heart than those types of numbers that I just shared.

Speaker D: Great, great to hear. I mean, we're almost up in terms of time. I just wondered about the future for. We sort of touched on the U.S. are there any other exciting things that we should be looking out

Speaker E: for? Well, I can't give you any dates on things. Anything that's regulatory related, I would say we're certainly interested in that direction of the world. And of course we had a little nod and wink here to the uk and then also I would just say do a quick Google search on where would these types of people want to be or where do they want to live and where are their lines and what are the, you know, instead of corridors that occur, by the way, if you guys. And there's instead of like large corridor, like there's a large corridor between Europe and the us, there's another one that goes into South America. And the. So those are the things that we look at. Where are the users that we serve? How, what do they need? How would we reach them? Would it make sense to prioritize this one over that one? And we'll keep doing everything we can. I mean, ultimately we would love to be the global. You could go anywhere you wanted to go and you don't have to change your bank. Like that's a wonderful vision to have for a user because that's all they really want. They really don't care so much about all the shit that the people in the banking industry want to talk about. What they really care about is that yes, it's safe and it works and I make good money and I can pay the stuff I want and it doesn't take me that much time. And you know what? I trust it. It's quite that simple. So the overcomplication that we do in the industry of all these other things is a loss of attention on the user which we hope to never have happen with us. And it just would be against our DNA.

Speaker C: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Joey Wilson, for your time today. And also I wanted to reveal that actually I am biased in how I think about bank because I named you as a winner in the book.

Speaker E: Yes, I know

Speaker C: like half a dozen banks. I think you guys are likely to succeed.

Speaker E: I think it was clean sheet was the term that was used.

Speaker C: You read that bit. Okay, good. But it is that focus on the customer. I think David's been talking about this for a good 30 years, as long as I've known him and as long as the Internet's been going. But it's good to see it finally in action with the bang. Like bunk. So, uh, well done to you guys, and thank you for your time.

Speaker E: Thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to talk to you both. It's a fun conversation. Happy to come back if there's anything else I can add.

Speaker C: Absolutely.

Speaker E: Cheers. Ciao, guys.

Speaker A: Thank you for tuning in to Dave and Dom Demystify. We hope you enjoyed the show. Don't forget to like and subscribe and tune in next time as we take another topic and demystify it.